


Playtime

by SectoBoss



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Gen, Hide and Seek, beasts - Freeform, frisbee
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-20
Updated: 2015-06-20
Packaged: 2018-04-05 05:24:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4167570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SectoBoss/pseuds/SectoBoss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Emil and Lalli find an old-world toy in the ruins of a house, which turns out to be more useful than either of them could possibly have imagined.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Playtime

_Site 15: Suburban home, records show the owners took delivery of a large variety of books a few days before the Danish borders closed. Shipping invoice said books were delivered from the Amazon: humid jungle climate, coupled with long distance of delivery, implies books would have been air-sealed. Could be in good condition if stored well! Note to self: third invoice I’ve found showing books shipped from the Amazon – perhaps South America was a large academic and literary hub in the old world? Must investigate further._

 

* * *

 

 _Watch the road_ , Sigrun had said. Emil sighed to himself and leaned against the windowframe next to him, careful not to snag his clothing on any of the broken glass that still hung in it. _For what?_ he wondered idly. The day was bright and cold – the bitter tang of winter was starting to seep into the air – and the houses all around them were cheap pre-fabricated buildings that looked like they would blow over in the first storm to come calling. From his view out of the first-floor window Emil could see them lined up in rows, stretching off to the horizon in two directions, and not a single one didn’t have a collapsed roof and a cluster of eager creeping plants reclaiming their walls.

Old world suburbia was full of what Sigrun magisterially referred to as ‘crap buildings’, he thought. Quite frankly he was surprised that the people back then – who he had always thought of as possessing the common sense and intelligence that only Sweden had managed to truly preserve – had consented to live in these dwellings. He certainly wouldn’t have. And neither, he imagined, would anything else. These rotting ruins would be useless against the cold.

He craned his neck to get a better view of the road that ran in front of the house. He would have gotten a much better view from the window of the room next to the one he was in. But looking out of that window would mean turning his back on the thing they had found growing out of the bed in that room. And he wasn’t prepared to do that, no matter how much Sigrun tried to reassure him that it was dead.

So instead he was peering out of the window of what he guessed had been a child’s bedroom. He found an angle that let him see the back end of the tank and he watched Mikkel, Sigrun and Lalli load up the cargo hold with the books they’d found sealed and boxed up in the house’s cellar. Inside, Reynir and Tuuri were piling them into neat stacks and jotting down notes on what they’d found. Emil felt a sudden stab of annoyance that everyone else seemed to have something useful to do while he was hanging around on guard duty. That feeling only grew stronger when Sigrun and Lalli headed back inside the house – he could hear Sigrun’s voice waft up the stairway to where he stood – and left Mikkel outside, who leaned back against the tank’s side and kept an eye on the road.

He huffed and stepped back from the window. _Watch the road_ , indeed! Privately he suspected Sigrun had chosen a job for him that would keep him out of the way and, more importantly, out of trouble. After the debacles at the library and the school he wasn’t entirely surprised. He would have been the first to admit that perhaps his track record hadn’t been fantastic, but how on earth was he supposed to buck that trend if he wasn’t allowed to do anything useful?

He picked his way over a pile of mould in the vague outline of a teddy bear and stood in the middle of the room. Definitely a child’s room, he thought. The bed, what was left of it, was too small for it to be anything else. His mind wandered and he started idly poking around, curious. In his head, he’d always imagined that the oldworlders’ houses would be full of high-tech, incomprehensible gadgets like in the stories his grandparents had told him when he was a boy: machines that did all the work for you, huge screens in every room that had all the information in the world on them, food from every corner of the world in refrigerators that never needed their iceboxes changing. Even the children had been given tech that would make a skald weep in happiness, just to shut them up. Or at least, that was what he’d heard. But the room he was stood in, or what was left of it, looked disappointingly normal. The tiny bed had the remains of a small mobile hung above it – a grimy rocket and a single forlorn star still hung by a thread – and there were a few oddly rectangular patches of mildew on the walls that Emil guessed were all that were left of posters. He tried to imagine what an old-world child would have posters of, in a world where you didn’t have to learn the First Rule before the age of five, and could not.

A glimmer of colour caught his eye as he looked around. Something bright yellow, tucked awkwardly between the bed and the nightstand like it had fallen down there. He walked over and peered down at it. It was a plastic disc, still canary-yellow despite the thin dusting of dirt and muck on its surface. _A gramophone?_ he thought with a little jolt of glee. He bent down and picked it up, grinning. What a stroke of luck! Sigrun had put him on guard duty to keep him out of the way, and he’d found something worth more than all the books in the cellar put together! He held it up to the light streaming in through the broken window. This was sure to put him in her good books again.

His moment of triumph was short-lived, however. The more he inspected the strange disc, the more he suspected it might not actually be what he hoped it was. It was the wrong shape to start with, too large and with an odd downward flange on its rim. The colour was all wrong, too – old-world gramophones tended to be shiny and reflective like the ones they’d found in the school, but this was a flat matte yellow. There wasn’t even a hole in the middle for the spindle – just more plastic, with the word ‘frisbee’ emblazoned across the centre in jagged black letters. He guessed that was some Danish word for ‘useless lump of plastic’.

He muttered something obscene and, in a fit of annoyance, hurled the damn thing out of the window. The way he was holding it put a spin on it as he let go, like when he used to go skimming stones on the shores of Lake Siljan in summer with his uncle. He expected to see the thing go tumbling to the ground, and was turning his back on the window, when he noticed that it hadn’t fallen at all. The strange piece of plastic was _flying_ , swooping over the overgrown front lawn of the house and touching down neatly in the long grass a few paces away from the tank’s back doors.

Emil’s mind briefly reeled at the technology of the old world, which could turn even a piece of garbage into a miracle. He peered out of the window and made a note of where it had fallen.

He smiled to himself as he went back on watch. He might not have found something as valuable as a book, but at least he hadn’t completely wasted his time.

Half an hour later, as they packed up to leave, no-one saw him quickly stoop down and stuff something into the top of his bag. However, Sigrun did notice that Emil seemed in much better spirits than when they had set out that morning.

 

* * *

 

By late afternoon, Emil thought he was getting the hang of the frisbee.

The trick, he had decided, was all in the wrist. You had to give it a certain _flick_ when you let it go, otherwise is just ended up tumbling drunkenly through the air. But if you got it just right, you could send it off in a glide that could take it up to ten metres – further, if he was lucky enough and it didn’t hit any of the trees that dotted the topside of the Kastrup fort.

He had clambered up the mound of earth behind the tank about an hour or two ago, once he had finished packing the books into crates and helping decontaminate the rest of the crew. Sigrun had asked him where he'd been going with the beginnings of a frown on her face, but had been placated by his promise to remain well within earshot of the camp. Emil guessed she wasn’t about to begrudge him some time on his own after both a week cooped up in the tank and two nasty close calls. He was grateful for that. Besides, this was to be their last night in the Kastrup fort before they headed out to a new campsite. It didn’t pay to spend too much time in one place out here, Sigrun had said as she had rolled the map out on the table and started picking potential new campsites with the help of Tuuri and Mikkel. So Emil supposed it would be a nice way to say farewell to the place they had called home for a short while.

He sent the frisbee skimming back towards the hollow that the tank was nestled in. The yellow plastic flared bright as it caught the setting sun and turned the toy into a disc of fire whirling in between the trees. With a hollow clatter it hit one of the trunks and fell to the ground. Emil scowled slightly – he could get the thing to fly, but aiming it was still a bit of a challenge. He walked over and bent down to pick it up from the leaf litter and grass it was resting in.

He scooped it up, straightened, and came face-to-face with a pair of piercing blue eyes.

“ _Din djävul!_ ” he swore and jumped back in shock. “ _Lalli!_ Would you _please_ not sneak up on me like that?” He clutched his chest, wondering distantly if it was possible to have a heart attack at his age.

Lalli, for his part, stepped out from the tree he had been lurking behind and tilted his head at Emil. His eyes flicked to the frisbee and he frowned. Emil followed his gaze and grinned.

“What? This?” He raised the frisbee. “Watch this.” _This’ll impress him_ , he thought perhaps a bit too smugly as he bent his arm round and threw the frisbee with just the right amount of force – straight into a tree barely two metres away. The frisbee bounced off with a mocking rattle and rolled away into the forest.

The gods themselves would have been hard-pressed to detect the smirk on Lalli’s face, but Emil _knew_ it was there. He fought to stop his cheeks flushing red. “Alright, fine!” he cried, throwing his arms up and stalking over to where the frisbee had come to a halt. He picked it up and turned round to face Lalli. “You try!”

He hurled it back towards Lalli, whose eyes went wide as it bore down on him. Nimbly, the young Finn sidestepped the frisbee and for one furious moment Emil thought Lalli was just going to let it shoot past him and into the moat that ringed their encampment. He was just about to shout out something – for all the good that would have done – when Lalli raised one hand and deftly caught the frisbee between two fingers and a thumb.

Lalli looked at the thing in his hand for a few seconds like it had fallen on him from the sky, and then looked over to Emil. This time, Emil could see his grin from twenty paces away. He smiled back in spite of himself.

Tentatively, and a bit clumsily, Lalli threw the frisbee back to Emil. It was a terrible shot that swerved off to the right and wobbled half-heartedly through the air away from the pair of them, and Emil had to dash after it before it disappeared down the hill. Lalli shrugged, as if to say _oh well, I tried_ , and looked a little disappointed.

“It’s all in the wrist!” Emil called back to Lalli as he prepared to throw it back. He paused. Lalli wouldn’t have understood a word of that. Instead Emil mimed throwing the frisbee, putting extra emphasis on the flick you had to give it as you let go. Lalli watched him like a hawk.

Emil sent the frisbee back and Lalli caught it as easily as before. This time as Lalli threw it he put the spin on it that Emil had demonstrated and the frisbee flew straight and true, straight at Emil who yelped and caught it a whisker before it slammed into his face. He lowered it and glared at Lalli, who shrugged and smiled apologetically. _Sorry._

“Beginner’s luck!” Emil called back, jabbing a finger at Lalli and raising an eyebrow in an effort to look serious that was completely negated by the grin tugging at his lips. _It’s on now.  
_

Lalli gave him a look that said _bring it, Swede_.

“With pleasure,” Emil muttered gleefully, and hurled the frisbee almost as hard as he could.

And that’s how it went for the next hour, as the sky faded from cold blue to weak yellow to a deep, fiery orange. Emil had practice and raw strength on his side, but Lalli was quicker and more agile – and a very fast learner to boot. What started out as a friendly game of catch quickly descended into a kind of projectile tag, the two of them dashing between the trees and jinking out of the way of the frisbee as they sent it flying between them, each one trying to get a bead on the other and make it as hard as possible to be hit in turn.

Emil, frisbee in hand, pressed his back against the trunk of a tree and grinned manically. He couldn’t remember having this much fun in a long time. And, if the occasional high-pitched snort of laughter coming from behind a tree a few metres behind him was any indication, neither could Lalli. _You’re mine_ , he thought as he hatched a plan. _See if the forest gods can protect you from Swedish tactics!_

He heard leaves crunch underfoot and stepped out from behind the tree. Quickly turning round, he threw the frisbee at the white blur that was Lalli sprinting from one piece of cover to another. Emil saw Lalli’s eyes go wide as he realised he’d been ambushed, and thought he heard him shout something oddly rhythmical and almost poetic in that strange language of his.

Emil was completely unprepared for what happened next. Out of nowhere a strong gust of wind swept through the forest, kicking up dust and leaves and whipping his hair into his eyes. The frisbee was sent tumbling by the sudden squall and dropped out of the sky like stone. Without missing a beat, Lalli reach out and caught it. He skidded to a halt, aimed, and flung it back at Emil before dashing behind the nearest tree. The frisbee, carried on the gust now it was going in the opposite direction, flicked across the distance between the two of them and would have hit Emil square in the chest if he hadn’t slipped on a patch of loose dead leaves and collapsed unceremoniously onto the ground.

The frisbee shot over his head, close enough to trim a few loose strands sticking up from Emil’s scalp, and disappeared over the top of the fort’s hill.

“What was _that_?” Emil cried, sitting up and rubbing his behind. Lalli poked his head out from behind the tree and shrugged. He pointed up the hill in the direction the toy had gone and nodded. _You dropped it, you fetch it.  
_

“Oh, come on! You’re the one who threw it so hard!”

Another point, another nod.

“ _Fine._ ”

Emil picked himself up and stomped up to the crest of the hill in a huff. _Lazy good-for-nothing Finns_ , he thought to himself. He stood at the top of the hill and looked around. At least the forest wasn’t particularly thick – it was more of a wood, now he thought about it. If it had been, they’d probably never find it again. As it was he spied a glimmer of yellow in the grass a few paces away and sauntered down the hill to pick it up.

“Found it!” he called as he came back up over the hill, holding it above his head like it was a trophy. “Hey, Lalli!”

Emil frowned. Lalli was about halfway down the hill from him, stood exactly where he had been when Emil had left just a couple of minutes ago. Despite Emil’s shouts he gave no indication that he’d heard him. Instead he was staring off to Emil’s right, as if at something out in the woods around them.

“Lalli?” Emil called again.

Lalli’s head whipped round to face him. His face was a mask of fear.

“Lalli, wha-”

Emil suddenly became aware of a noise, a deep bass rumble, coming from where his friend had been staring at. In unison they turned to look.

From behind a tree, out of a puddle of shadow cast by the woods around them, came a dog.

It was huge, almost as long as Emil was tall, and he could almost see the animal’s powerful muscles bunching and clenching under its skin as it slunk towards them. Its fur was a matted patchwork of light brown and black. _German shepherd_ , some part of his mind told him, remembering the time he had sat down one summer afternoon with a book of dog breeds when he was only a boy.

 _It might not be infected_ he thought desperately. _There might be some other reason it’s sticking to the shadows._

Jagged teeth gleamed in its mouth. Emil squinted into the murk. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Lalli slowly start to reach for a scabbard on his belt. The dog’s eyes were hard to see in the dim evening light. Emil could feel his breath coming in shorter and shorter bursts, terror getting its claws in deep. Memories of a school, of slender bone tearing aside old skin, of a whine turning into a screech, flitted through his head. His hands began to tremble and he felt rooted to the spot.

The dog turned its head and Emil saw it eyes. They writhed.

And everything seemed to happen at once.

The dog snarled, a thick wet sound that nothing healthy ever made, and tensed. Lalli’s hand shot to his belt, to the dagger he kept there. Emil drew breath to scream for help, the frisbee still clutched uselessly in his hand, and then in his blind panic he raised his hand, pulled back his arm, flicked his wrist _just so_ and cried out perhaps the stupidest thing he ever had done in his nineteen years.

“ _Here, boy! Catch!_ ”

 

* * *

 

_I don’t want to kill you I don’t I swear. But I can’t stop it. I have to do what it says.  
_

_Please just don’t struggle, it’ll be quick.  
_

_I’m sorry.  
_

“Here, boy!”

_What?  
_

_…m…master? Is that you? My nose isn’t very good anymore. And my eyes…  
_

_It is… is it? It is! It’s you!  
_

_I thought you’d left me, but you’re back!  
_

_NO! I won’t kill you, I won’t,_ it can’t make me _!  
_

_What’s that you’ve got there? Are we going to play a game, like we used to? Please?  
_

_What do you want me to…  
_

“Catch!”

_Yes! Oh, yes! We used to play this one all the time! I knew you’d come back! And I waited for you, just like I promised! I’m such a good dog-_

* * *

 

The beast’s jaws clamped down firmly on the flimsy plastic, shattering it in two with a loud _crack_. It landed awkwardly from the jump it had pulled to catch the frisbee and barely had time to recover before Lalli cannoned into its side, knocking it of balance. The beast yowled and toppled to ground, snapping its jaws at him. Lalli raised his hand, his knife glinting in the light, and brought it down once, twice, three times on the beast’s neck.

Something in its neck gave way under the onslaught and red fountained out, spraying down Lalli’s front and spattering across his face. The beast gave a choking wine and scrabbled on the ground.

A fourth blow, a whimper, and then silence.

Emil stood where he was, his arm still outstretched from the throw, unable to move. Lalli staggered to his feet, then collapsed back to his knees and was unceremoniously sick next to the beast’s corpse.

Slowly, more carefully, Lalli stood up a second time and picked his way over to Emil. The young Swede seemed almost catatonic with fear. Lalli clicked his fingers in front if Emil’s eyes and was rewarded with a frightened blink.

“Huh?” Emil murmured, his arm falling down to his side. “What?” He tried to focus on the red thing in front of him. “Who… Lalli!” his eyes went wide in shock as he took stock of his friend covered almost head to toe in blood. “You’re hurt, we need to get you to…”

Lalli shook his head and jerked his thumb back at the body behind him.

“Oh,” Emil said meekly after a few seconds. He felt like he was falling in and out of reality. Monsters lurking in forests, in schoolhouses, on the ceilings of abandoned buildings, all crowded his mind and he desperately willed them away.

Wordlessly, Lalli grabbed his friend by the sleeve and frog-marched him off down the hill, towards the encampment. Emil moved like a sleepwalker and Lalli had to stop him from walking into trees and tripping over roots. They stopped a good twenty paces from the edge of the camp – or Lalli did, Emil tried to carry on towards the safety of the tank on some kind of survival autopilot before Lalli dragged him back.

Mikkel, who had been sat next to the door of the tank reading a book, looked up and his eyes went wide at what he saw. Two kids, one covered in blood and one blank-faced and wide eyed in shell-shock. He jumped to his feet, the book falling forgotten to the ground.

Lalli’s knowledge of the international hand signals for these situations was rusty to the point of uselessness, but nevertheless he did his best. _Need decontamination, no injuries, no immediate danger._ To his immense relief, the big Dane seemed to understand.

“Masks on! Now!” Mikkel bellowed into the tank, as he reached for the hosepipe.

 

* * *

 

The next morning, at first light, the tank rumbled off in search of a better campsite – one where the local wildlife wasn’t wise to their presence yet.

It left behind little trace it had ever been there. Tracks in the mud which would soon be filled in. A pit full of waste which the scavengers would have. And, up in the woods, a small hollow dug in the earth and filled with two yellow shards of plastic and a red loop of cloth with a rusted metal buckle on it.

As they drove, Emil fingered a small circle of metal in his pocket. He had retrieved it last night and left it in the decontamination chamber for twelve hours straight – just to be sure. The raised letters felt rough under his touch and he felt he could spell them out from memory now:

_My name is Axel! If found, please call Klaus and Leah on…  
_

Emil sighed and turned to stare out of the window.

 _Hope you find them, boy_ , he thought.


End file.
